Tor gives users access to the normal internet, as well as countless. To get there, you first need to download Tor (which stands for “The Onion Router”), an encrypted internet browser that, by redirecting a user’s internet connection a number of times, obscures their location, browsing activity, and IP information. Simply put: The deep web has become a relative safe haven for anyone trying to anonymously use the internet. But, because the deep web is defined as anything not indexed on traditional search engines, those criminal sites actually only make up a small fraction of what’s available beneath the iceberg of the internet.

Ninety-four percent of the traffic requests coming over Tor, the browser software that opens up the deep web, can be classified as “per se malicious” according to a blog post from the security company CloudFare in March, just a year after another team of researchers determined 80 percent of deep net visits are related to child porn sites. Make no mistake: Quite a few sites on that big bad deep web are used for criminal purposes. You just have to look past the headlines to believe it. True, you can get your hands on everything from brown tar heroin to a contract hacker on the deep web, but there’s actually more to do on that hidden section of the internet than explore illegal services.

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